Fatal Tide Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR LIS WIEHL

  THE EAST SALEM TRILOGY

  “The second East Salem novel is as frightening as the first. The supernatural elements fit perfectly with the faith-filled storyline, and the mystery captivates from the first page.”

  —RT BOOK REVIEWS

  “… [An] exciting faith-based series that skillfully blends romantic tension, gripping supernatural suspense, and a brutal crime.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  REVIEW OF WAKING HOURS

  “… [A] truly chilling predator and some great snappy, funny dialogue will keep readers engaged.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  REVIEW OF WAKING HOURS

  “One word describes Waking Hours by Wiehl and Nelson—WOW! A gut-wrenching ride of supernatural suspense that left me breathless and wanting more. The book was a reminder that the battle between God and Satan is not over. Highly recommended!”

  —COLLEEN COBLE, BEST-SELLING

  AUTHOR OF LONESTAR ANGEL AND

  THE ROCK HARBOR SERIES

  “A gripping plot, intriguing characters, supernatural underpinnings, and a splash of romance make Waking Hours a fast-paced and thoroughly enjoyable read. I want the next book in the series now!”

  —JAMES L. RUBART, AWARD—

  WINNING AUTHOR OF ROOMS

  A MATTER OF TRUST

  “This suspenseful first in a new series from Wiehl and Henry opens with a bang.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “[A] thoroughly satisfying mystery, well paced and tightly written. Mia and Charlie are intriguing characters, and readers can hope they’ll return in future novels.”

  —CBA RETAILERS + RESOURCES

  “Dramatic, moving, intense. A Matter of Trust gives us an amazing insight into the life of a prosecutor—and mom. Mia Quinn reminds me of Lis.”

  —MAXINE PAETRO, NEW YORK

  TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR

  “A Matter of Trust is a stunning crime series debut from one of my favorite authors, Lis Wiehl. Smart, suspenseful, and full of twists that only an insider like Wiehl could pull off. I want prosecutor Mia Quinn in my corner when murder’s on the docket—she’s a compelling new character and I look forward to seeing her again soon.”

  —LINDA FAIRSTEIN, NEW YORK

  TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR

  THE TRIPLE THREAT SERIES

  “Only a brilliant lawyer, prosecutor, and journalist like Lis Wiehl could put together a mystery this thrilling! The incredible characters and nonstop twists will leave you mesmerized. Open [Face of Betrayal] and find a comfortable seat because you won’t want to put it down!”

  —E. D. HILL, FOX NEWS ANCHOR

  “Three smart women crack the big cases! Makes perfect sense to me. [Face of Betrayal] blew me away!”

  —JEANINE PIRRO, FORMER

  DA; HOSTS THE CW’S DAYTIME

  COURT TELEVISION REALITY

  SHOW JUDGE JEANINE PIRRO

  “Who killed loudmouth radio guy Jim Fate? The game is afoot! Hand of Fate is a fun thriller, taking you inside the media world and the justice system—scary places to be!”

  —BILL O’REILLY, FOX

  TV AND RADIO ANCHOR

  “As a television crime writer and producer, I expect novels to deliver pulse-pounding tales with major twists. Hand of Fate delivers big-time.”

  —PAM VEASEY, WRITER AND

  EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF CSI: NY

  “Book Three in the wonderful Triple Threat Series is a fast-paced thriller full of twists and turns that will keep you guessing until the end. What makes these books stand out for me is my ability to identify so easily with Allison, Nic, and Cassidy. I truly care about what happens to each of them, and the challenges they face this time are heart-wrenching and realistic. I highly recommend!”

  —DEBORAH SINCLAIRE, EDITOR-IN—

  CHIEF, BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB

  AND THE STEPHEN KING LIBRARY

  “Beautiful, successful, and charismatic on the outside but underneath a twisted killer. She’s brilliant and crazy and comes racing at the reader with knives and a smile. The most chilling villain you’ll meet … because she could live next door to you.”

  —DR. DALE ARCHER, CLINICAL

  PSYCHIATRIST, REGARDING HEART OF ICE

  FATAL TIDE

  ALSO BY LIS WIEHL

  WITH PETE NELSON

  The East Salem Trilogy

  Waking Hours

  Darkness Rising

  WITH APRIL HENRY

  The Triple Threat Series

  Face of Betrayal

  Hand of Fate

  Heart of Ice

  Eyes of Justice

  Mia Quinn Mysteries

  A Matter of Trust

  © 2013 by Lis Wiehl

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Page design by Mandi Cofer.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., books may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Scripture quotations are taken from the REVISED STANDARD VERSION of the Bible. © 1946, 1952, 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission.

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-40169-015-1 (ITPE)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wiehl, Lis W.

  Fatal tide / Lis Wiehl with Pete Nelson.

  pages cm. — (The East Salem trilogy ; bk 3)

  ISBN 978-1-59554-946-4 (hardcover)

  1. Paranormal fiction. I. Nelson, Peter, 1953-II. Title.

  PS3623.I382F38 2013

  813’.6—dc23

  2013009865

  Printed in the United States of America

  13 14 15 16 17 18 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Dani and Jacob, with

  unconditional love always, Mom

  Contents

  1. December 20

  2. December 20

  3. December 21

  4. December 21

  5. December 21

  6. December 21

  7. December 21

  8. December 21

  9. December 21

  10. December 21

  11. December 21

  12. December 21

  13. December 21

  14. December 22

  15. December 22

  16. December 22

  17. December 22

  18. December 22

  19. December 22

  20. December 22

  21. December 22

  22. December 22

  23. December 22

  24. December 22

  25. December 23

  26. December 23

  27. December 23

  28. December 23

  29. December 23

  30. December 23

  31. December 23

  32. December 23

  33. December 23

  34. December 23

  35. December 24

  36. December 24

  37. December 24

  38. December 24

  39. December 24

  40. December 24

  41
. December 24

  42. December 24

  43. December 24

  44. December 24

  45. December 24

  46. December 24

  47. December 25

  Reading Group Guide

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  1.

  December 20

  8:45 p.m. EST

  “Where are we going?” the boy asked. A feeling, a premonition perhaps, told him something wasn’t right, but he didn’t know what it was. He wondered if he was being kidnapped.

  “Airport,” the driver, George Gardener, said.

  The boy realized he’d made a mistake, telling them he’d remembered to grab his passport. He should have pretended he’d lost it. Then they couldn’t fly him out of the country.

  “Don’t you think we’d be safer at Mr. Gunderson’s house?”

  Tommy Gunderson lived in a large stone house on twenty-two acres surrounded by a stone wall topped by a deer fence. He had security cameras, including hi-def, night vision, and infrared, triggered by motion detectors, and he had a small arsenal of weapons. The boy had shown up at Tommy’s gate with a Bible in his hand, betting they’d let him in. He’d come to get information.

  “I’m afraid that’s the first place the people who are trying to kill you will look,” the man in the backseat said. His name was Julian Villanegre, and he was even older than the driver, probably over eighty, the boy guessed. He was an art historian and, like the boy, he was British. “You’ll be safer if we can get you to a place where they won’t think to look. And so far, we don’t think they know you’re with us.”

  “That makes sense,” the boy said. He had to think of a way to get them to turn the car around. They were still in East Salem, New York, fifty miles north of Manhattan and their destination, the international terminal at JFK, where the men hoped to catch a late-night flight to London.

  The car wound through a snowy winter landscape along a narrow two-lane roller coaster of a road. He’d asked to sit in the front seat, where they wouldn’t be able to use the child locks to keep him in the car. He wondered what would happen if he jumped out while it was still moving. He looked at the speedometer. Thirty-two miles an hour. He guessed he’d probably survive. Once they got on the freeway it would be too late. He kept his hand on the door handle.

  “Are you sure your house is safer?”

  “One of the advantages of living in a castle,” Villanegre said, smiling from the backseat. “It costs a small fortune to heat, but when withstanding a siege is desired, it suits one to a tittle. My ancestors survived three. I think it will do.”

  “They said you’d fill me in on the way,” the boy said. His name was Reese Stratton-Mallins. He was seventeen.

  “It’s a very long story, I’m afraid,” Villanegre said. “One of the oldest too.”

  “And St. Adrian’s Academy is part of it?”

  “Very much at the center of it, it seems,” the old man told him. “The people who run your school are very bad people who will stop at nothing. You’re quite correct to be wary of them. Some of them aren’t even people.”

  George looked over his shoulder at Villanegre, as if to say, I hope you know what you’re doing.

  “What does that mean?” Reese asked.

  “Do you know what demons are?” Villanegre replied.

  “Demons?” the boy said. He was feigning innocence, but he’d learned a long time ago that he had the kind of face, a look others found sweet and unaffected, that made feigning innocence easy.

  “The written record is often traced to the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible,” Villanegre said. “When Satan decided to defy God, he was cast out of heaven. Scholars and theologians disagree on the precise numbers, but the consensus suggests perhaps as many as a third of the angels went with him. And the conflict remains. An unseen war. In which we are the foot soldiers, and sometimes the battlefield. The fallen angels can appear to us in demonic form, or they can take human form.”

  “Are you saying some of the people at my school are demons?” the boy said.

  The old man in the backseat only nodded. The car paused at a stop sign. A light snow fell, requiring the intermittent use of windshield wipers.

  “Do you know who?” The boy had a hunch.

  Villanegre shook his head.

  “Do you know since when?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Villanegre replied. “When the Druids were driven out of England, roughly a thousand years ago, some of them managed to hire a Viking ship to bring them to America. For a while they went into hiding. But we believe they established your school more than two hundred years ago at its present location.”

  “We?”

  “Our … group,” Villanegre said. “Generations of us. Though Tommy Gunderson and Dani—Dr. Harris—are quite new to the organization. They’ve taken over for George’s mother, who recently passed.”

  “Like the Knights Templar, then?” Reese asked.

  George shook his head, not so much in response to his question, Reese gathered, as to say things were bad and unlikely to get better.

  “The comparison is apt,” Villanegre replied. “The Curatoriat, as we call ourselves, are very much soldiers for Christ, but we have no affiliation with any particular denomination or church. We’re special ops, you might say.”

  With every passing minute, the station wagon Tommy had loaned them was getting farther and farther from Tommy’s house where, Reese believed, he could get the answers he needed. He decided to give it one more try, and then he would take his chances bailing from the car.

  “Is something going on now?” he asked, though he knew the answer.

  “There was a prophecy,” Villanegre said. “That painting in the school art museum—”

  “The Garden of Earthly Delights?”

  “Yes,” Villanegre said, nodding. “The prophecy said when it and the pagans who commissioned it were reunited …”

  “What? What would happen?”

  “Do you know the phrase ‘hell breaks loose’?” Villanegre asked. “Some of us believe the things in the painting’s depiction of hell are going to, well, come true. Here. That hell and earth will be one. That’s what we’re trying to stop.”

  This was more like it, Reese thought. Now he was finding out something that might be useful.

  “When you sent Dr. Harris a sample of the drug and the list of names, what did you think you were sending her?” Villanegre asked him. “I gather you could have found yourself in a great amount of trouble if they’d caught you.”

  “I thought they were testing a drug that would enhance learning,” the boy said. “Like Adderall.”

  “It’s quite a bit worse than that,” Villanegre said.

  “Why?” Reese asked. “What does it do?”

  “Dr. McKellen or Dr. Harris would be better people to ask.” The Englishman used the side of his hand to wipe the fog from the window and gazed out at the night.

  Reese followed his gaze. The leaves were off the trees, and a shallow layer of snow blanketed the ground, pocked by the tracks of deer and raccoons and foxes and coyotes forming trails that led between the hills and the reservoirs.

  “It doesn’t make anyone better. It makes anyone who takes it sick. Mentally and emotionally. And I dare say spiritually.”

  “Is that what Amos Kasden was on when he killed that girl?”

  “We think so.”

  Reese had only pretended to take the pills his school gave him, but he couldn’t be sure that they weren’t putting something in his food. He was closing in on the answer he sought.

  “Did you figure out how it works?” he asked.

  “It’s quite complex,” Villanegre said. “We think it is introduced environmentally in vitro, but there may be other delivery mechanisms. When it kicks in at puberty, it overwhelms the user with hormones and feelings of uncontrolled rage. Accompanied by a release of adrenaline. You can imagine the rest. We’re still trying
to find out how it works and what they intend to do with it.”

  Reese had a feeling he knew what they were going to do, and a stronger feeling as to when they were going to do it. The question now was—were the people driving in the car with him people he could trust? He would hurt them if he had to … but if they were kidnapping him, why would they send two old men whom he could easily overpower?

  It was not his own life or soul he was worried about. But his soul had two parts, in a sense—and it was the other half he feared for.

  “Were a lot of your classmates given performance-enhancing drugs?” Villanegre asked.

  “All of us were,” Reese said, glancing at his cell phone to check the time. “It depended on what—” He was interrupted by something falling onto the roof of the car. “What was that?”

  “Probably just a branch,” George said, turning on his high beams to penetrate the darkness ahead. “All these storms and hurricanes we’ve had lately been knockin’ the beans out of these old trees. Whenever we get so much as a little breeze, everything falls on the power lines, and it takes four or five days before the electric company can—”

  Before George could finish his sentence, a massive black arm punched a hole in the windshield and a large black hand closed around his throat.

  The car veered suddenly to the left. Instinctively, Reese grabbed the wheel and pulled it hard clockwise to keep the vehicle on the road.

  George screamed as he stiffened and slammed on the brakes.

  The car screeched.

  Reese felt a spray of blood on his face. Some kind of beast was attacking the car, a black shape that scrambled for purchase against the sheet metal of the hood. As the vehicle lurched to a stop, the creature’s claws closed around the driver’s windpipe, piercing the skin and puncturing an artery. Blood spurted onto the dashboard in a gush.

  As Reese turned his head, a second creature tore the back door from its hinges, its head and arms hanging down into the opening as it reached for the passenger in the rear seat.

  Two! he thought, looking around. More than two?